The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
E-Commerce companies use regional distribution centers (RDC) to fulfill orders placed by customers form different geographical areas in a timely manner. However, due to the capacity limit of warehouses, it is impossible to store all items sold on the company's website in one RDC. An order containing an item that is not stored in the RDC serving the area will come in several packages, since the missing item needs to be shipped from another RDC which has it. In this case, the order is called being split. The order split leads to longer fulfillment time, higher cost regarding additional packing materials and shipping cost.
It is therefore important to carefully select items to be stored in an RDC. Conventionally, items with high sales volume are considered as high ranking candidates to be stored. However, those sales-based methods have some disadvantages. For example, they ignore relationship between different items since the items are being considered in an independent manner. Further, they do not use understandings of an item in the decision making process since only sales data are involved.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.